Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a prevalent multicarrier modulation method that has been adopted in numerous standards such as IEEE 802.11a/g/p, LTE, and DVB-T/T2. Key advantages of OFDM are its high spectral efficiency, ability to equalize wideband channels, and its robustness to inter-symbol interference (ISI). However, OFDM is sensitive to time and frequency offsets which need to be estimated in order to demodulate the received data with low bit error rate. Much research has focused on blindly estimating these offsets, as blind estimators have the advantage of not requiring any known training data to estimate some desired parameter, thus preserving high bandwidth efficiency. Further, blind estimators do not require any knowledge of the channel.
A major drawback of proposed estimation methods is that they are high in computational complexity, which increases power consumption and reduces the lifetime of the communications device. There is a need for an adaptive real-time OFDM synchronization method with reduced computational complexity.